Darby and Joan

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The Word of the Day for August 12 is:

Darby and Joan   \dar-bee-and-JOAN\   noun
     : a happily married usually elderly couple

Example sentence:
     Mr. and Mrs. Goodman, the village's Darby and Joan, were often seen 
walking hand in hand along the beach.

Did you know?
     "Old Darby, with Joan by his side, / You've often regarded with wonder: / 
He's dropsical, she is sore-eyed, / Yet they're never happy asunder." Thus ran 
the lines of a poem published in 1735 under the title "The Joys of Love Never 
Forgot: A Song." By the mid-1700s, the elderly couple introduced in that poem 
had become symbolic of devoted couples. According to some sources, the verse's 
author was an amateur poet named Henry Woodfall and its inspiration was a 
real-life couple: a printer named John Darby (who was Woodfall's employer) and 
his wife Joan. Whoever they were originally, a more modern version of the two 
later appeared in a song titled simply "Darby and Joan," a collaboration of 
Frederic Weatherly and James Molloy.